Inside Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005: Query Tuning and Optimization

SQL Trace Architecture and Terminology

SQL Trace is a SQL Server database engine technology, and it is important to understand that the client-side Profiler tool is really nothing more than a wrapper over the server-side functionality. When tracing, we monitor for specific events, which are generated when various actions occur in the database engine. For example, a user login or the execution of a query are each actions that cause events to fire. Each event has an associated collection of columns, which are attributes that contain data collected when the event fires. For instance, in the case of a query we can collect data about when the query started, how long it took, and how much CPU time it used. Finally, each trace can specify filters, ...